Vintage Corvettes Still Winners At 44

by Larry Roberts

May 29, 2001

For most spectators at the recent vintage car road races at Sears
Point International Raceway in the wine country of Northern California,
it was an opportunity to spend a day in the sun and peruse race cars
that were popular during bygone eras. Held in a relaxed atmosphere, the
meet lacked the drama, high stakes and intensity of professional events
put on by NASCAR, CART, IRL and ALMS, the professional sports car
endurance racing body. And it was even lower-pressure than the similar
annual event held each spring at Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey. There,
big-buck promotions by international corporations have tended to negate
the "folksiness" of the vintage car genre.

But to many of us who trekked there, it was an experience was like
stepping out of a time machine and into our own pasts. We had often
watched or driven these same cars in amateur sports car races starting
in the mid-'40s. It was like going home.

After the perfunctory practice sessions for cars that were to
compete in the nine different races, the first event was for cars that
dated back to pre-World War II days. I enjoyed watching Bentleys,
Bugattis, Vauxhalls and Chryslers reenact battles they fought at Le Mans
in the '20s, even though they had retired from combat before I was born.

Another interesting event pitted an eclectic field of loosely-
defined "sports" cars that ranged from tiny one-off Crosley specials
with their less-than-a-liter engines, through sleek and stately Jaguar
XK120s and on up to the homely, homemade 6.0-liter Cannon coupe that is
as ugly today as it was when I took its picture at a local race nearly
50 years ago.

My favorite in this contest was the dead-last 1951 "Twin H Power"
Hudson Hornet that had been meticulously resurrected into a replica of
the NASCAR-winning car driven by Marshall Teague, an early-day champion
at Daytona Beach.

There were short 10-lap races for race cars as diverse as a 1916
stark National that was little more than a stripped chassis with a huge
engine and a seat for the driver to international Formula One cars, the
newest of which was a 1983 Williams FW08C.

But the race that held the most interest for me was the one that
contained "production" sports cars that had been produced from 1959 to
1963, the narrow time-span that encompassed the cars that I modified and
raced back then. My sentimental favorites were the three Sunbeam Alpines
like the ones that I was involved with in the early to mid-'60s. But in
a repeat of what were the usual results of these contests four decades
ago, it was a pair of Chevrolet Corvettes that took the top two
finishing positions.

Younger spectators viewing those vintage car races no doubt enjoyed
a day of seeing a slice of things the way they were for their fathers
and, in many cases, their grandfathers. But for many of us "graybeards,"
it was a chance to relive an era in which we were young and so were the
now-vintage cars we raced.